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Microsoft Can't DRM Docs Fast Enough
grcumb writes "As part of the DoJ Anti-trust settlement, Microsoft was ordered to provide freely available documentation for its communications protocols. InfoWorld is reporting that not only are they late in delivering the required APIs, but it's because they want to convert everything to the read-only Web Archive (MHT) format, which can only be viewed in MSIE. InfoWorld reports that, "In July, Microsoft said it would complete revisions of the documentation required by the court in the autumn, a season generally reckoned to include the months of September, October and November in North America, but may now have to extend work on a beta or test version of the new documentation into December...." So we have to wait longer for a format that makes the content harder for developers (developers! developers!) to use. Maybe they didn't read the documentation ..."
RFC 2557: MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML (MHTML)
There's a Mozilla KB entry about MHTML support and open bugs for load and save (IDs 18764 and 40873; bugzilla won't accept links from Slashdot). Plus the maf extension to support MHTML.
Duh! Being Microsoft, they had to make things harder for developers to use. After all, if they made it easy, it would be a Macintosh.
I am shocked
Or are they just trying to look slick?
The opposite of progress is congress
The might make them available only in printed form, and only to people who pay an admin fee of a few hundred dollars.
Ermmm yeah. What part of "freely available" means available only in MSIE?
The (Developers! Developers!) reference is about the Steve Ballmer Monkey Boy Dance.
The DoJ should make 'em turn the docs into manpages. You know, just to piss Billy off.
to slither itself out of something they don't want to do but are ordered to b delays and tactics like this...they are supposed to make things freely avalable thats something they dont want to do but tey have to so they make it as much of a pain in the ass as posible for everyone...too bad the system is more bueracracy and less common sense...
Well thats ok then. Now where's that format? Oh www.microsoft.com/download/mht-fileformat.mht .....
It's mostly text and can be printed right? And then later (if anyone cares enough to do it) scanned into non-DRM documents...
So much for DRM lol
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
Microsoft said it would complete revisions of the documentation required by the court in the autumn, a season generally reckoned to include the months of September, October and November in North America, but may now have to extend work on a beta or test version of the new documentation into December..
Actually winter normally does not officially commence until around December 22nd. So they are quite within a reasonable timeframe to complete it in early December and still be done in autumn.
...Microsoft said it would complete revisions of the documentation required by the court in the autumn...
How can a company tell a court that they will finish something in a season? Shouldn't a deadline from a court ruling have a specific date attached to it?
MHT and MHTML files are actually really cool and its too bad other browsers don't support it. (Or in Mozilla's case, support it outside of the mail client.) I wonder if its just because MS came up with the idea? (AFAIK)
The format is *extremely* useful for things like demo'ing a web site or portions of a website on a frequent basis to different people. I work for a company where we are constantly updating our demo server with new accounts, constantly creating new subdomains, etc, just to allow a client to view the site in their browser securely. We need to be able to take premission away from them after the demo period is over, as well as, make sure unprivledged users don't see the content.
This could all be solved by storing the mhtml archive of the web content in our digital asset management system. Administering that is much easier that setting up new domains/users/etc.
But alas, nobody supports it.
1;
If the judge demands that the documentation for Microsoft APIs is open an available for everyone, how is delivering said documentation in a form that only IE can read, meeting the judge demands?
Actually you're wrong, they aren't compressed at all, they are encoded in Base64 transfer encoding.. so.. they are actually 33% larger then they need to be (refering to the emdedded images). On the plus side, they are very simple to decode and convert to straight HTML + images, they are not one way, or DRM'd, or compressed....
The current government is a
1) Republican administration
2) To which Microsoft was the third largest corporate donor.
This means that things like Department of Justice orders from *previous* administrations don't count.
May we never see th
Microsoft's policy is that all downloadable documents and specifications etc. should be signed, so you can verify that the document hasn't been tampered with. Usually they implement that by embedding a word document in an (signed) Windows executable. MHT seems to be an improvement.
...that they would get a contempt of court citation, but they deserve it.
None of this corporate nonsense will end, and it will continue to get worse and worse, until the law is readjusted to reflect that only named individual human beings have personal rights. Corporations avoid a lot of "guilt" by hiding behind the artificial person legal construct. It's beyond loony, was insane when it was aquired, now it's out of control and has lead to defacto fascism, let's call it what it is.
And I blame the law/justice/court system just as much in this mess as the corporations.
"Microsoft" should have never gone to trial, it should have been named humans, completely responsible for their decisions.
Here's a thought, a mass protest by millions of people having a nationwide "incorporation day", flood the system with incorporation papers and lawsuits, a tidal wave of paperwork shuffling, patent applications, copyright registrations, and so on and so forth. Get every human to be part of their own friends and family corporation, watch the system grind to a halt, THEN maybe we'll get some change. Take every single tax break corporations get, fill out the paperwork. Why should they get all the tax break perks, and avoid personal responsibility? Sue the pants off of every large existing corporation out there, find little picyaune laws you can use. Patent everything possible, no matter how obscure. Challenge "no warranty" EULAS in small claims court all over. Serve every PHB out there with papers detailing your employment status, make them sign off to you on every single decision. They balk, sue em. Hand your own puchase contract to every shopkeeper out there when you go to buy something, demand they sign it for the sale.
They want stupid, inane, ridiculous, society choking crap busywork and laws I say give it to 'em!
Completely drown them in their own corporate/governmental/so called "legal system" paperwork BS.....
If MS has to provide freely available documentation, and the documentation they provide is only accessable using IE....doesn't this mean that MS should provide me with a free Windows license if I choose to develop my Windows software on a Linux workstation? :)
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Just as its a shame that Firefox doesn't support Active X. WTF are those Mozilla clod's working on anyway? I want more bug ridden features, not a stable browser.
Don't we just need one machine on the net somewhere to which we can...
Not if it gets Slashdotted.
we're gonna need you to go ahead and implement everything in MHT. So if you could just go ahead and get the docs on how to read MHT docs... they're on our web site in MHT format... yeahhhh - that'd be great. And we'll need the TPS reports by the fall, too.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
They aren't required to make anything "freely" available. They just have to make their documentation available under licensing terms. A few companies have already joined the company (like NetApp). NetApp gave a talk about it at the CIFS 2004 conference. Basically, the documentation they provided was incompletely, incorrect, and provided less info than they already knew. However, they did work with NetApp to improve the documentation. I'm not sure what this article is referring to though. This progam is well over a year old...
You can use the RMS SDK to build a shared document library that can protect and deliver RMS-protected documents on demand.
I was unaware that Mr. Stallman had contributed such a thing to Microsoft. Funny that I couldn't find a link at gnu.org.
The antitrust suit from burst.com or whoever they are and the article recently mentioned pretty-much says it all with regards to Microsoft tactics.
They are like children always trying to slither and wriggle their way out of things. It's disgusting and dishonorable. What's worse is that the court system seems to tollerate it all too often. I'm not a lawyer which is probably why I have a pretty clear picture of "right and wrong" in this.
Basically, the court ordered them to do something and they failed to comply. The court should take action and not accept excuses. Freely available is freely available -- locking it down through format is not freely available and NOT what the court intended.
It's signed with an IE only rights management plugin. So where's the freely availiable source code to their garbage browser and rights plugin that will make this document freely availiable as per the terms of the court order?
What's wrong with text/plain or text/html anyway?
No, you dont have to buy anything from adobe. There are many free ways to create PDF files..
One quick example is "pdfcreator".. its a pseduo printer driver that exports directly to PDF format..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The current government is a
1) Republican administration
2) To which Microsoft was the third largest corporate donor.
This means that things like Department of Justice orders from *previous* administrations don't count.
I don't like the DoJ's soft-on-microsoft attitude either.
But would you prefer it if a Democratic administration couldn't decide to soft-pedal decisions made by, say, the appointees of Bush's administration?
You know they will. They always have.
Sauce for the goose IS sauce for the gander. So let's not get partisan over it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Just the other day I was wondering if FireFox, or another Mozilla system would support this file format. The basic premise is it take an entire web page (including exteral resources such as images, CSS, javascript, etc) and puts it in one file. You can open these files in a text editor and see they represent a multipart, plain text document. So MS's reasoning for doing this is to make them a little friendlier to download, although only viewable on IE. No encryption or compression that I saw.
That said, I'm glad to see Mozilla is looking to support this. Again, its a fairly open and simple format and I don't know why they are having a hard time converting their docs to this. They probably did it in Word and are trying to export as HTML. This will kill almost any webmaster...
"The plaintiffs have three main areas of concern about the documentation.
First among these is that Microsoft, asked to open up and document the interfaces to its communication protocols for licensees, has chosen to issue the documentation in a rights-protected file format called MHT, readable only with its own Web browser, Internet Explorer. This means licensees can neither annotate nor effectively search the information, according to the plaintiffs. "
Gatescorp can't find a way to translate them to HTML.
I saw that metadata and I must admit that seeing the last 10 authors, the fact that MS folks had crashed no less than 2 times in the document itself, and seeing the revealed tracked changes that showed up again as a result of the corrupting document was a real hoot. Apparently the folks at Microsoft were somewhat horrified...
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult. -Whitton
The DRM is not the compression part. The files are encrypted. If you DID RTFA, you would have read:
And that MS is offering aThe problem with this dev toolkit is that it is MS only, so that means no Linux, Mac, *BSD or Solaris for the DRM of these MHT files. These documents are for developers who may want to interact with MS's proprietary communications protocols, and some of them may be working on different OSes to make those other OSes use MS's proprietary communications protocols. Now they will be forced to use MS windows to get to the documentation.If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Microsoft will make themselves look good by saying they are doing it for the customer. the people that don't know will sing their praises
The problem is not that it is MHTML, but that the MHTML resource is embedded in a file in Microsoft's DRM format.
But have you seen the bloated HTML that MS Word creates? A fast workstation could take months! :D
So why don't these fools who are trying to hack Fairplay do something useful in the fight against unreasonable DRM and turn their attention towards MHT.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Doesn't Microsoft own a publishing company called, "Microsoft Press"? MS seems to be able to produce large books (hat usually sit in shrinkwrap boxes and are typically found in the Windows administrator's cube. Maybe MS could take a small break from printing books nobody reads to printing books required as part an important anti-trust settlement.
They should be thankful that I am not the judge in this case. When a company has a technical publishing department and can't provide timely techical documentation then that is CONTEMPT!
Bug 18764 has 73 votes and many duplicates, which makes it fairly popular. It isn't the the most voted-for bug though; some have well over 100 votes.
bug 40873 (Save As MHTML) has 180, so it's a top 10 bug.
You might try the MAF extension to Firefox.
"This is an archive extension that allows complete web pages to be saved in a single archive file. MAF stands for Mozilla Archive Format and the extension uses RDF to save page meta-data such as the original URL of the page and the date/time the page was put in the archive. It also allows pages to be saved in a separate MHTML compatible format for interoperability with IE systems."
Rights-Managed HTML, yet another MS proprietary method to "embrace and extend" a known open standard.
RMH is a subformat of Microsoft's Rights Management System (tm). Yes, that's right, it's called RMS . How's that for doublespeak?
You WILL produce following documentation by (30days) or the following MS officers will report to jail for contempt of court... What part of 30 minutes would be necessary if capital punishment were involved?
You've got to give them some credit for the creatively sinister solutions they come up with. This reminds me of "Microsoft Would Settle For The Children."
If only they put so much innovation into their software...
I believe this is probably the first shot over the bow... so to speak. I see this, and other M$oft tactics, as a sign that they are getting ready to use the DMCA (and hopefully the IDUCE act if it *GASP* get's passed) to bully the wayward explorers that have moved away from them to the Open Source Initiative. They will end up wrapping EVERY file that is created through their programs in some for of DRM/File Encryption so that they can sue the pants of anyone who writes an import program, like Open Office and all the other Office "Compatible" suites. I think this is a step in the wrong direction that needs to be stopped before Microsoft has the right to deny the CIA or the President the right to view a document simply because it was created by Microsoft Word and they want to view it in open office.
The really scarry part... All the above coupled with "Trusted Computing" and you no longer own anything you create, you no longer own a "lifetime" license to the software you purchased, hell you don't even really OWN your hardware at that point............
And people wonder why geeks view M$oft as such a bad company. It's a perfect example of the damage that can be done by an entity that has a monopoly on the system.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
So, it takes Microsoft years to convert docs from one format to another... Perhaps instead of using e.g. some simple script they've hired a guy who spends whole days clicking, dragging & dropping. Definitely The Microsoft Way.
The trusted software would prevent the trusted OS from allowing printscreen to work. The trusted hardware could check to ensure that the code hasn't been modified and that a tamper-proof certified monitor is attached. Then the subliminal patterns in the scan codes could inform your DRM enabled digital camera that it cannot take a photo, or if it does, to attach the appropriate DRM status on the resultant photo.
Of course you would only use a trusted camera on your trusted computer because nothing else would work.
Hardware companies would only get the certifier keys if they produce nothing but trusted hardware. The marketplace for non-trusted hardware being minimal since "only pirates need that stuff", conventional recording devices will fade into history.
Finally, yes, you could just write it down and key it back in, but your trusted software places your identity in your documents so that if you redistribute them, they'll have a fingerprint to find out who did it... and if you do manage to produce an untrusted document... no trusted computer will open it since it is not trusted.
DRM is a long term plan.
Come on, mods. Up this one - the parent of it is at 5, but this (or the other reply that clarifies that Microsoft is proposing DRM-encumbered documentation) needs to be visible too. It's not plain MHT format that Microsoft is trying to use.
It has almost nothing to do with the format being one that (for the moment) only internet explorer can read. It has everything to do with the fact that the documentation is in a format designed to lock out free software. (I can't imagine that the license for Microsoft's DRM developers toolkit would allow one to release implementing code in source form)
I suspect that Microsoft has already done the engineering and is just trying to figure out how to spin the egg they'll get on their face when this happens. I'm sure the word "terrorists" will somehow be involved.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Programming for classic MacOS was hard. Programming for NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP was easy. Programming for OS X is easy. Certain the implementation of Cocoa isn't given away, but the interface and excellent documentation is. Besides, with protocols and categories it is often unnecessary to subclass objects, thus making understand them less necessary. It's also nice that GUI code is unnecessary in most circumstances.
English is easier said than done.
Some excerpts from that page:
Clear enough for ya?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Do I get to dictate the terms under which I satisfy the court's orders?
Logic (not that logic has anything to do with our legal system) would suggest that if the court orders me to produce records, the court, not I now controls the records.
In the past, producing the records in one format or other would seem to satisfy the requirements of the court--the court now has the records, and I do not control them.
However, if I attempt to satisfy the court's order by producing records in a DRM format--one in which I control the use of the records--I have explicitly said "I, not the court, control those records."
Doesn't sound like I've produced much of anything at that point.
Is there a lawyer in the house?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Microsoft was created largely by some changes in IP law that created a niche for a software monopoly.
Containing that would be simple:
Require that all software for which the developer
wants IP protection have source code escrowed that would go into the public domain after some finite time(say 5-10 years).
Use Constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce to move taxes from the broad public onto companies that have a measurable degree of monopoly power.
Now this isn't being done because congress is intent on selling their offices to the highest bidder.
Gates has always said that there isn't any judgement that he won't ignore (okay, so not the exact quote, but it is the intent).
Why is anyone surprised by MS actions?
The crock is that the law only applies to those who can't afford to get out of it. For Gates and such, laws are only inconveniences.
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Breakfast served all day!
Just because you don't pay money, doesn't mean it's free.
...oh, wait.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever read...
Reminds me: My dad was a missionary to various countries in South America -- he spoke fluent Spanish. One day a fellow preacher came by, from the US (Estados Unidos), to give a grand Protestant sermon to the mostly Catholic-born natives. The title of his sermon (in English): "The Difference Between Righteousness by Faith and Justification by Faith". (Yes, humans often quibble over the finest of details.)
He had to take a seat, aghast and flabbergasted, after just ten minutes into his 90-minute sermon, when his translator (mi papa) explained to him that, in Spanish, there is only one word (Justicia) for his two words, Justification and Righteousness.
Freedom, sir... I'll take Freedom over Free, any day.
What's so difficult about a read-only format?
There is nothing wrong with a read-only format. There is a problem with the read-only format they have chosen. "Freely available" were the words used in the instructions. These documents can only be viewed in IE with a special plug-in from MS. IE runs on 2 platforms, Windows and MacOS (sort of). MS has deprecated the mac version, leaving Windows the only actively maintained platform for reading this documentation. Windows costs money.
If I complied with a court order to provide documentation, by putting the documents in a safe deposit box and offering to sell people copies of the key, I'd be rotting in a cell by now. Bill Gates should spend at least one night in the lock-up for this crap.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
I thought it was often more difficult to develop Macintosh applications because more of the API's are hidden away and not for developers to see
Mac OS X is pretty damned open. XML configuration files, an open-source kernel (!), free IDE, the native compiler is gcc, the API is extensively documented, and there are extensive tools for reading the class libraries and interfaces shipped in the developer's kit.